Which had more impact on the net?

Thu Sep 27 05:52:31 UTC 2001

At 01:47 AM 9/27/2001 -0400, Sean Donelan wrote:
 >
 >
 >Which had more impact on the the net?
 >
 >   1. Destruction in New York City Sept 11 and following days
 >   2. Nimda virus/worm on Sept Sept 18 and following days
 >   3. Multiple fiber cuts on Sept 26

I vote for #3, if you are considering a purely technological / routing 
Point Of View, which is the point of this mailing list.  Affecting the 
backbones hurts everyone, everywhere, trying to do anything on the 
'Net.  The other are two localized (either in type or location) to matter 
overall.

NIMDA did not affect e-mail, chat, IM, et cetera (pretty much), and did not 
even affect most web servers enough to matter to end users.  News web sites 
being down did not affect anything other than the news web sites being 
down.  And the destruction of a couple COs within a few city blocks (*and* 
a few city blocks :-{ ) is not - from a purely technological / routing 
standpoint - that big a deal.

OTOH, #1 has a much more lasting impact.  From increased traffic on web 
sites for years to come if this drags out, to the affect on "disaster 
planning", to the impact many of us who help run the Internet feel (I know 
I do), September 11th will have a much more profound impact on the 'Net 
than fiber cuts, especially in the long term

But then, even if not one fiber was cut, not one website saw increased 
traffic, and not one colo was damaged on September 11th, it would still 
have a more of an impact than the other two in a lot of ways which are hard 
to measure at the command line of a cisco or Juniper.

--
TTFN,
patrick